Tommy Lee Jones, wrote the screenplay, directed and stars in this film, based on Glendon Swarthout's 1988 novel, which was originally intended for Paul Newman to direct some years ago before he gave up on the project.

Tommy Lee Jones, wrote the screenplay, directed and stars in this film, based on Glendon Swarthout's 1988 novel, which was originally intended for Paul Newman to direct some years ago before he gave up on the project. His directorial debut ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ was a decade ago – was also a movie about friendships, quests and alienation.His love of western genre, all dust and tumbleweeds is expressed here via a deconstruction of the grim reality for women in the Old West – married women forced to deal with sexually abusive husbands, loneliness or the incredibly high death rate for children. The ‘Homesman’ is about women. Women are the centre of the action, women drive the action forward, women are not only damsels in distress but heroic figures of grit and courage. The cast: Hilary Swank, John Lithgow, Tim Blake Nelson, James Spader and Jones (who again casts himself as the craggy and cantankerous reluctant hero) are all excellent in this road movie – takes us from travels from west to east, from the unmarked Nebraska territory to a town in Iowa – like all road movies the main essence here is the monotony of the landscape, unforgiving and endless with many stories to tell.

The visual style is simple and clean, and the cinematography finds some gorgeous John Ford touches; people shown in black silhouette through barn doorways, or house doorways, with the vast bright landscape beyond. The novelist and the director are interested in unlikely characters who have to show extraordinary courage and strength. Tommy Lee Jones, as a director, homes in on the surreal aspects of the story set amongst the brutal reality of frontier life with beautiful sensitivity and strangeness.